Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/426

 the powers of an inherent and innate heat, assimilated by means of concoction, as it were out of a contrary. For the crude and unconcocted are contrary to the concocted and as- similated, as the unmusical man is to the musical, and the sick to the sound man.

And when the blood is engendered from the clear colliqua- ment, or a clear fluid is produced from the white or the yelk, there is generation as regards the former, corruption as regards the latter; a transmutation, namely, is made from the extremes of contraries, the subject-matter all the while remaining the same. To explain: by the breaking up of the first form of the white, the colliquament is produced; and from the consumption of this colliquament, follows the form of the blood, in the same way precisely as food is converted into the substance of the thing fed.

It is thus, then, that the chick is said to be made out of the egg, as it were by a contrary ; for in the nutrition and growth of the chick in the egg, white and yelk are equally broken up and consumed, and finally the whole substance of the egg. It is clear, therefore, that the chick is formed from the egg, as it were by a contrary, namely the aliment, and as if by an abstraction, and from a non-entity. For the first particle of the chick, viz. : the blood or punctum saliens, is constituted out of something which is not blood, and alto- gether its contrary, the same subject-matter always remaining.

The chick too is made from the egg, as a man is made from a boy. For in the same way, as out of plants seeds arise, and out of seeds, buds, sprouts, stems, flowers, and fruits ; so also out of the egg, the seed of the hen is produced, the dilatation of the cicatricula and the colliquament, the blood and the heart, as the first particle of the foetus or fruit ; and all this, in the same way as the day from the night, the sum- mer from the spring, a man from a boy one follows or comes after the other. So that, in the same way as fruits arise after flowers on the same stem, so likewise is the colliqua- ment formed after the egg, the blood after this, as from the primogeneous humour, the chick after the blood, and out of it, as the whole out of a part ; in the same way, as by Epicharmus's exaggeration, out of calumnies comes cursing, and out of cursing fighting. For the blood first begins its